Turing’s Test 103
prevalent from the nineteenth century onwards.
11
Chelaby goes furthest
in this regard, explicitly calling journalism “an Anglo-American invention”,
12
while Williams offers a more critical examination of the hegemony of this model, also referred to as the “professional” or “liberal”
model.
13
While agreeing with Williams’s disparagement of the parochialism of much academic research in the late twentieth century, which
tended to fix upon this Anglo-American model as self-evidently correct,
Chelaby’s observed that the “professionalisation” of journalism in the
late nineteenth century had important contributions to make to a notion
of the algorithm of news. Most notable was the refusal of a new generation of journalists to engage in political processes (which was very
different from the careers of early writers a century or more before),
which, in turn, led to an emphasis upon objectivity and impartiality in
the public sphere, that the task of the journalist was to report the news
and no more.
14
So pervasive is this notion that journalism is news – and
thus there is a right way and a wrong way to be a journalist – that Hamilton and Tworek have recently produced an extremely useful analysis
of the Anglo-American model, drawing upon epigenetics to argue that
a better way of thinking of journalism is as a “coating” on the DNA of
news: “The types of news and the conventions for providing news, the
chemical or protein packaging, have been in flux, changing depending
on environmental factors and coated by past experience.”
15
As such,
rather than considering the Anglo-American model as something essential to the nature of journalism, it should instead be seen as the product
of a particular set of historical circumstances. For a number of reasons,
I am more sanguine than some commentators about the intervention of
automated journalism: while it most definitely does represent a threat to
the fate of a number of writers who were involved in particular aspects
of producing the news (and whose jobs were under threat for a variety
of reasons prior to the rise of automated journalism), nonetheless that
kind of objective, fact-reporting news does not by any means represent
all journalism and that is to leave aside how such facts are collected in
the first place. This is not to downplay the difficulties of the current transition: I feel huge sympathies for many journalists who face increased
competition from software, but also believe that software is simply incapable, for the foreseeable future, of achieving many of the tasks required of human writers. Automation works where data are supplied
in a structured format and an algorithm can be applied – and this does
not apply to the vast majority of writing. At the same time, a shift from
the Anglo-American model does not mean an acceptance of “anything
goes” in its place: as we have seen in the previous chapter, it is precisely
the laissez-faire attitude of the new tech media companies that has resulted in some of the most egregious errors taking place in reporting
around the world. Automated journalism, however, is not a threat to
journalism per se.
prevalent from the nineteenth century onwards.
11
Chelaby goes furthest
in this regard, explicitly calling journalism “an Anglo-American invention”,
12
while Williams offers a more critical examination of the hegemony of this model, also referred to as the “professional” or “liberal”
model.
13
While agreeing with Williams’s disparagement of the parochialism of much academic research in the late twentieth century, which
tended to fix upon this Anglo-American model as self-evidently correct,
Chelaby’s observed that the “professionalisation” of journalism in the
late nineteenth century had important contributions to make to a notion
of the algorithm of news. Most notable was the refusal of a new generation of journalists to engage in political processes (which was very
different from the careers of early writers a century or more before),
which, in turn, led to an emphasis upon objectivity and impartiality in
the public sphere, that the task of the journalist was to report the news
and no more.
14
So pervasive is this notion that journalism is news – and
thus there is a right way and a wrong way to be a journalist – that Hamilton and Tworek have recently produced an extremely useful analysis
of the Anglo-American model, drawing upon epigenetics to argue that
a better way of thinking of journalism is as a “coating” on the DNA of
news: “The types of news and the conventions for providing news, the
chemical or protein packaging, have been in flux, changing depending
on environmental factors and coated by past experience.”
15
As such,
rather than considering the Anglo-American model as something essential to the nature of journalism, it should instead be seen as the product
of a particular set of historical circumstances. For a number of reasons,
I am more sanguine than some commentators about the intervention of
automated journalism: while it most definitely does represent a threat to
the fate of a number of writers who were involved in particular aspects
of producing the news (and whose jobs were under threat for a variety
of reasons prior to the rise of automated journalism), nonetheless that
kind of objective, fact-reporting news does not by any means represent
all journalism and that is to leave aside how such facts are collected in
the first place. This is not to downplay the difficulties of the current transition: I feel huge sympathies for many journalists who face increased
competition from software, but also believe that software is simply incapable, for the foreseeable future, of achieving many of the tasks required of human writers. Automation works where data are supplied
in a structured format and an algorithm can be applied – and this does
not apply to the vast majority of writing. At the same time, a shift from
the Anglo-American model does not mean an acceptance of “anything
goes” in its place: as we have seen in the previous chapter, it is precisely
the laissez-faire attitude of the new tech media companies that has resulted in some of the most egregious errors taking place in reporting
around the world. Automated journalism, however, is not a threat to
journalism per se.